Monday, July 21, 2008

The November surprise

With millions of new voters heading to the polls this November and many states introducing new voting technologies, election officials and voting monitors say they fear the combination is likely to create long lines, stressed-out poll workers and late tallies on Election Day.

At least 11 states will use new voting equipment as the nation shifts away from touch-screen machines and to the paper ballots of optical scanners, which will be used by more than 55 percent of voters.

About half of all voters will use machines unlike the ones they used in the last presidential election, experts say, and more than half of the states will use new statewide databases to verify voter registration.

With Senator Barack Obama’s candidacy expected to attract many people who have never encountered a voting machine, voting experts and election officials say they are worried that the system may buckle under the increased strain.

Here's the open line. Also, the day's roundup of news and comment.

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Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys may have found an exit strategy for the growing controversy over player protests of racial inequities and Donald Trump's boorishness.

Diane Ravitch, a powerful voice against the billionaires trying to replace an egalitarian public education system with a fractured system of winners and losers segregated by race and income in private or privately operated schools, is giving a shoutout to Barclay Key of Little Rock for his review of Little Rock 60 years after the school crisis.

In which I fix an overlooked speaker in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's coverage of the observance of the 60th anniversary of Central High School desegregation

More evidence in the Washington Post that voter ID laws suppress votes, particularly among groups likely to vote Democratic. And the evidence is from Wisconsin, where a microscopic victory gave Donald Trump that state's electoral votes.

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